It seems odd that any paper on this topic (I read both TFA and the paper it references) would not mention PowerShell once, nor the broader issue of how the Unix shell uses text streams as the only intermediary format between pipeline components.
For better or worse, it's what I and my team used to manage a decent size VMware cluster of a hundred hosts and 6k VMs ( I think, it was a very long time ago)
Wouldn't go back, but there are aspects I miss
There are also other typed shells that appeal to yourself which aren't Powershell but do have behaviours similar to Powershell and which do play a lot more nicely with the wider Linux / UNIX ecosystem:
- murex https://github.com/lmorg/murex
- Elvish https://github.com/elves/elvish
- NGS https://github.com/ngs-lang/ngs
I'm the maintainer of murex so happy to answer any questions on that shell here. I do know the the maintainers of Elvish and NGS pop on HN too.
The gp (Paul) is not "advertising Powershell" and he's not recommending people switch to it.
Instead, he's saying that it's strange that an academic paper talking about future concepts doesn't even have a cursory survey of what other popular shells have done.
Here's an example of that style of writing where other platform technologies are mentioned: Joshua Bloch is a ex-Sun employee and Java advocate proposing new syntax for Automatic Resource Management and in his note, he mentions what C# and C++ did: http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/coin-dev/2009-Februar...
It shouldn't have to be said that citing C# & C++ does not mean it's an "ad for C#".
When a new 2021 paper about future of shells has no mention of zsh, Powershell, etc by the authors, it's reasonable for readers to wonder if the team has overlooked what others have done. E.g. Powershell was designed by ex-UNIX admins.
50 years is quite the time horizon after all